Meme Cuisine: Honey Badger Hot Sauce

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Meme Cuisine: Honey Badger Hot Sauce

The honey badger has a taste for high-caliber munitions.

Photo: Courtesy Chris Glastier

Product licensing used to be so easy. If you wanted to make a Mickey Mouse watch, you'd ring up Walt Disney and negotiate terms. But what if you want to create products based on an internet meme like Philosoraptor or the honey badger? It's not like you can call 4chan to ask for permission.

However, that's just what Chris Glaister, Leigh Zalusky, and Paul Lees wanted to do. The trio of design engineers and amateur barbecue buffs decided to make a hot sauce based on the internet-famous critter. The team created a habanero-infused, "Cobra Strength," hot sauce and decided their creation required a container "vicious enough to contain this spicy awesomeness." So, they designed a custom bottle to honor the pugnacious mammal, and are now working on securing distribution.

In case you're unfamiliar with the meme, a narrator named "Randall" added a hilariously sassy voiceover to a National Geographic clip featuring a furry, fearless, cobra-killing creature called the honey badger. It became a YouTube sensation with 49 million views and counting.

While any redditor knows the "Honey Badger Don't Care," Randall did, and sent a cease and desist letter to Glaister, Zalusky, and Lees. Glaister hopes that an amicable a settlement can be reached. But Honey Badger Sauce raises an interesting legal question: Does Randall have any real claim on this product? National Geographic created the video. His narration certainly made it popular, and the sauce plays off his irreverent sense of humor, but he didn't invent the honey badger, develop the recipe, or promote it. If he deserves a cut, shouldn't National Geographic get a taste as well?

Product licensing is a $187 billion business and as younger generations spend less time watching TV – the usual source of licensable IP – web- and app-based creations will become increasingly popular springboards for products. Just look at this year's ROFLCon, which hosted talks on meme ownership, a decidedly un-ROFL-ey topic.

A hot sauce created in the image of a fearsome creature like the honey badger cannot be contained by a friendly honey bear.

X-ray images of the lungs of the first hCoV-EMC patient, two days apart. (NEJM Zaki 2012)

Beyond the precedent-setting legal matters, the trio also had to overcome more pedestrian concerns like making sure the bottle looked like a fearsome honey badger, not a cuddly honey bear. Luckily, Glaister has a masters degree in industrial design and experience designing kitchen projects that came in handy when working with the mold maker to ensure critical details, like the badger's teeth, made it into production.

None of it matters, though, unless the sauce is tasty. Lees is a keen barbecue chef who could cook up a mean batch of sauce for a cookout, but 10,000 bottles' worth? That meant finding a commercial kitchen, a process Glastier says is "surprisingly straightforward," if a bit slow. The trio provided their recipe and the chef they selected replicated it with production-grade ingredients.

"We went through eight iterations," Glastier says. "The first was terrible, the second was terrible, the third was reasonable, and by the last one it was perfect.... We ate the entire bottle in the car park of the kitchen."

Fans of the honey badger know that it just takes what it wants, but if you want to try the sauce, it's currently raising funds on Kickstarter.